What Should You Do Weeks Before The MFE Exam?

The time has come to push through the final barrier. Your exam sitting is about two weeks away.

What should you do a few weeks before your exam?

• Continue to Practice

Create customized Adapt exams with the difficulty level ranging from 4 to 6. According to our survey, Adapt exams with these difficulty levels are most representative of the actual exam. However, to avoid being too comfortable with level 4 – 6 exams, you should keep yourself challenged by creating customized exams with difficulty 7 and above, occasionally.

Treat the Adapt exams as the actual exam. Stick to the 3-hour time limit. Refrain from peeking at your formula sheet or notes. Use an SOA-approved calculator.

• Review the Problems

If you did not get a problem right, review the Adapt solution for that problem. Understand why you did not get the problem right. After that, rework the problem.

If you have questions about a specific problem or concept, use the discussion forum to ask these questions. Our support team will respond to your questions as soon as we can.

• Create a Quiz

Based on the results from your Adapt exams, identify your weak topics. Then, create quizzes to practice on those topics.

Exam-Taking Strategy

The key to passing MFE is to answer all the questions that you know how to do correctly. There are 30 questions in the MFE exam. From the SOA website, you can see that the recent historical pass marks are around 72%. So, you know you need to answer at least 30(0.72) = 21.6 questions correctly in order to pass the exam. The key is to identify these 22 questions in your exam and solve them correctly.

When you are going through the exam problems, you must be willing to skip a problem. There is no point spending too much time on a single problem, and ending up with less time, leading to careless mistakes on other easier problems you do know how to solve. Keep in mind that all questions in the multiple choice exams count the same. Solving a very easy problem correctly and solving a very difficult problem correctly count the same. Remember that your goal in the exam is to get enough questions correct to pass. Why bother spending 15 minutes solving a difficult question (which you may end up not able to solve) when you can use those 15 minutes to solve 2 or more easier questions?

What does this mean? If you read a problem and don’t understand the problem during the first read, skip it. If you read a problem and think that you may be able to do the problem but may take some time to come up with the solution, mark it and skip it. Apply this strategy to all the questions during the first round through. After that, come back to the questions that you’ve marked and attempt those questions in your second round through. If you’re comfortable with at least 22 questions out of the 30 problems, you should be able to pass the exam.

If you are interested in knowing about how others have used Adapt to pass this exam in the past, visit this thread on the Actuarial Outpost.

Written by Tong Teh: The time has come to push through the final barrier. Your exam sitting is about one week away. What should you do one week before your exam? Continue to Practice Create customized exams with difficulty level ranging from 4 to 6. According to our survey, Adapt exams with these difficulty levels...

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